– Gaza and all of Palestine still need liberation
– Survivors of Nazi genocide say: Never again means no to Israel
– “Ferguson, Gaza and the U.S. state”

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Gaza and all of Palestine still need liberation

27 August 2014. A World to Win News Service. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has stopped with the signing of an open-ended cease-fire agreement with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority. No one can regret any interruption in Israel’s murderous attacks, which have killed almost 2,200 people in three weeks, some 500 of them children. But the blood that has been shed demands that the results be looked at objectively from the point of view of what it will take to liberate Palestine.

Hamas has celebrated this cease-fire as a victory, and so have many supporters of the Palestinian cause abroad. It seems that Israel did not achieve its immediate aims in this campaign, especially the destruction of Hamas, and the mood in Israel is now considerably darker than in Gaza. But what has really changed?

The agreement is, after all, a rerun of previous Israeli agreements, in 2012 and at the end of previous campaigns against Gaza: Palestinian fisherman will be able to sail in the coastal waters within 10 kilometres off the Gaza coast, and Israel has promised to allow some limited and as yet unspecified humanitarian supplies and construction materials to filter through the border crossings it controls. But the siege of Gaza has not been lifted.

As if to underscore this point, just before signing the cease-fire Israel bombed the only door to Gaza it does not control, in Rafah, on the Egyptian border. Although the border crossing was not completely destroyed, it goes nowhere but to Egypt. As the official sponsor of the cease-fire, the U.S.-backed Egyptian military regime will surely do its best to basically enforce the Israeli blockade.

Israel’s separation wall still surrounds most of the West Bank, which remains under occupation. The settlements remain and Israeli settlers will still be allowed to burn down Palestinian olive trees and lynch their Palestinian neighbours. Within the formal boundaries of Israel itself, including Jerusalem, the Israeli state has never been more brutal toward Palestinians.

The status quo for Palestinians is unbearable. How will this latest cease-fire change that?

The outcome so far may be viewed by Hamas as some sort of victory in terms of achieving its own goals, because its goal is religious rule and not the national liberation of Palestine, let alone a new and liberating society. But even in this regard it would be a big mistake to underestimate Israel’s viciousness and thirst for revenge in the completely unjustified guise of “self-defence”, which can only mean “defence” of the oppression of a people.

Most likely for Hamas, and explicitly in the thinking of some advocates for the Palestinian cause, the underlying reason for considering the cease-fire a victory lies in the idea that Israel’s massacres have produced “a shift in public opinion” that would oblige the U.S. and the European Union to change their policies on Israel.

In an article on the valuable, multilingual Web site Jadaliyya.com, its co-editor Mouin Rabbani wrote, “If in the aftermath of this crisis the U.S. responds with a renewed diplomatic initiative, it is unlikely to cut Israel as much slack as in years past. If it decides not to engage – and perhaps to reduce its protective embrace of Israel while Netanyahu remains prime minister – the prospect that the Palestinians and others will attempt to fill the vacuum with an agenda that seeks to end the occupation is greater than at any point since the 1993 Oslo agreement. The possibility that this Israeli government can pre-empt such scenarios with a diplomatic initiative enjoying significant international support is zero.” (Posted 26 August)

The problem with this one-sided conclusion is this: the U.S. and its allies have to take public opinion into account in their backing for Israel, but they will not and cannot stop protecting Israel. Any concessions they may pressure Israel to make would be for the purpose of ensuring the survival of the Zionist state. The current situation in the Middle East makes Israel even more central to their regional domination. The U.S., UK, France and Germany are not going to give up Israel just because of “shifts in public opinion”.

Furthermore, it is inconceivable that Israel will not try to use its military strength to enforce its domination of the Palestinians. This is because Israel’s existence as a “Jewish state” depends on crushing the rights and lives of the Palestinians who were driven out of their homes and national territory.

In fact, through the decades since the U.S. brokered the Oslo Agreements, Israel has made few if any significant concessions to the Palestinians. Every time the Palestinian Authority has made concessions, Israel has only turned around and humiliated it further. As for Hamas, its methods of war reflect its war aims – to pressure Israel and force it to accept Hamas’ rule.

For the U.S., while it may have some tactical differences with Netanyahu based on broader American regional interests, being able to both support Israel unconditionally and hypocritically “distance” itself from the Israeli government has worked out so far.

The U.S. and its allies will never come to the aid of the Palestinian people in any real way, and the failure to understand that can only harm the Palestinian cause.

Yes, “public opinion” is extremely important, especially if that means more and more people around the world coming to an attitude of total opposition to Israel and what it stands for, and beginning to “connect the dots” between its crimes and all the crimes committed by the capitalist/imperialist system in every country and against the planet itself. In rallying support for Palestine, including demands for lifting the blockade of Gaza, for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign and in other ways, a full understanding of the nature of the problem can only strengthen the fight.

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Survivors of Nazi genocide: “‘Never again'” means never again for anyone!”

25 August 2014. A World to Win News Service. The following statement was signed by 40 Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps for Jews and 287 children and other descendants of victims of that genocide. It appeared as a paid advertisement in The New York Times on 23 August and was widely reprinted and reposted. In Israel, when an article reporting on the statement appeared on the Facebook page of the newspaper Ha’aretz, about 15,000 people “liked” it by the next day. It is a reply to another paid advertisement that appeared in the NYT and UK newspapers by Elie Wiesel, a death camp survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who argued that Israel’s massacres of Palestinians were justified because they are part of “a battle of civilization versus barbarism”.

As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.

We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting neo-Nazi insignia.

Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.

We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

– end item-

“Ferguson, Gaza and the U.S. state”

25 August 2014. A World to Win News Service. The following article by Megan French Marcelin, who teaches at Colombia University in New York, was posted on Jadaliyya.com on 18 August 2014. It is one example of how people are seeking to “connect the dots” between the attack on Gaza and other examples of oppression imposed by a single imperialist world system now headed by the U.S.

Following the police shooting of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown on 9 August 2014, images of Ferguson, Missouri conjure the atrocities suffered by those living under military occupation in war zones across the world. They depict Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in battle helmets with guns trained on the foreheads and chests of Black women and men; military tanks circling residents demanding to know why police had killed yet another young black man; and protesters doused with tear gas crying with the pain of a substance long banned as a chemical weapon by the Geneva Convention.

Globally, people have responded to the use of military-like force on citizens with outrage and disgust, drawing connections between the treatment of U.S. residents of color and the current siege on Gaza. When St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar claimed that the police had done everything possible to practice “restraint”, he seemed to echo the words of Israeli officials justifying, yet again, civilian deaths in Gaza. Indeed, Palestinians have reacted to police brutality in Ferguson by providing advice on how to avoid the side effects of tear gas and expressing support for demonstrators there. Residents of Ferguson, in turn, have held signs reading “Free Gaza” alongside placards that state, “I AM A MAN”, evoking the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. This exchange between people on opposite sides of the world, and the hopeful networks of solidarity emerging therein, illuminate troubling aspects of the U.S. state and offer potential frames for global activism.

These two spaces are linked by the U.S. government-financed militarization that has supported sieges on communities with unequal access to power worldwide. In the Middle East, according to a collective of U.S. professors writing in 2011, the U.S. government has offered some 8.6 million dollars per day to Israeli forces for the occupation of the West Bank. While paying lip service to the idea of peace talks, the U.S. government has unhesitatingly shared damaging intelligence with, and supplied weapons and ammunition to, the Israeli state. Less than two weeks ago, U.S. lawmakers demonstrated their unfaltering support for Israel by approving 225 million dollars to maintain the Iron Dome, despite the perverse death toll of Palestinian residents as a result of offensive Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The long history of the U.S. government’s military support of Palestinian repression has been paralleled by the gearing up of militarization in state and local police forces inside the United States. Following the 1965 Watts Rebellion, where black and brown residents of Los Angeles took to the streets frustrated by the socio-economic limitations of civil rights legislation as well as police brutality, the arming of local police forces with paramilitary capabilities has had a disproportionate effect on low-income communities of colour, according to a recent study by the American Civil Liberties Union. The end of the Cold War initially exacerbated this trend, as Ronald Reagan launched a “war on drugs” that concocted low-income communities as a threat to domestic security. Since its 1997 inception, the Department of Defence’s 1033 program has also transferred military surplus weaponry – including tanks, helicopters, and M-16s – to local and state police forces. Through the program, police forces nationwide have received some 4.3 billion dollars in military-grade equipment.

However, the practice grew exponentially after 11 September 2001. With the premise of protecting citizens from acts of terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security has provided over thirty-four billion dollars in grants to local and state police forces. Ironically, just last year, the police chief of nearby St. Louis asked for an undetectable drone with which to police the city in case a terrorist attack took place. The pretext of fighting the “global war on terror” has had the result of turning communities of colour, long treated as enemies of the state, into potential war zones.

The troubling trend of increasing militarization is made more so by how political leadership has displaced responsibility for such violence. In Ferguson, as in Gaza, official U.S. demands for peace ignore the fact that the supply of military weaponry negates such a call to action. This irony has not been lost on residents in Missouri and abroad. One Palestinian tweeter, displaying an empty tear gas canister reading “Made in U.S.A,”offered satirical assurance to the citizens of Ferguson, saying that there should be no worry because the tear gas they faced had been tested on Palestinian civilians. If, as Missouri Congressional Representative Emanuel Cleaver rightly states in The Guardian, that it is “unconscionable that we would convert a city in the middle of America into a war zone,” it is equally unconscionable that we would provide Israel with the means to do so in Gaza.

This drawing of connections between Ferguson and Gaza also offers important critiques of power, space, and the politics of occupation. In Ferguson, a town where seventy percent of residents are Black, yet the power structure is predominantly white, protestors have readily evoked the language of an “occupied territory”, reminding those watching that their citizenship has always been second-class. The language of occupation signifies an appraisal made long ago by Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, among other civil rights organizations, who have used such a concept to critique the relationship of U.S. power to communities of colour nationwide. As residents of Ferguson chant “Gaza strip”at local police forces, they also connect to present-day struggles for liberation worldwide; they seek not only justice, but also self-determination.

Representing police activity in Ferguson as a colonial occupation brings to bear the connections between occupied spaces such as Gaza and low-income communities of colour in the United States, where residents have been physically barricaded from resources, denied access to education, red-lined from housing opportunities, stripped of citizenship, and segregated in apartheid-like conditions. The kind of outrage growing in Ferguson, Palestine, and other colonized spaces responds not only to the immediate events that have triggered action, but to decades upon decades of repressive occupation and the denial of social and political enfranchisement.

While the killing of Michael Brown has focused the media’s gaze on issues of police militarization and brutality, the residents of Ferguson, Missouri have been subjected daily to institutionally and structurally preserved inequalities, as well as the more hidden violence(s) they produce. Persistent harassment from police, often accompanied by brutality, is well known in Ferguson. Yet brutality and the marginalization of Ferguson residents go well beyond their interactions with the police. Unemployment in Ferguson stands at thirteen percent, according to recent data from the Brookings Institute, and nearly one in four residents lives below the federal poverty line. Access to education is indicative of these incidences of socio-economic violence. When the school district that Michael Brown attended received a “failing” designation, instead of transferring students to more prosperous districts, the state board of education voted to re-accredit the schools as a collaborative, allowing officials to shirk responsibility for inter-district inequities.

In Gaza, where the bombing of UN schools and the death of children has generated new criticism of the Israeli occupation, this appraisal has most often stopped short of grappling with the everyday violence Palestinians endure. In Gaza, the restriction of Palestinian movement and goods in and out of the strip has devastated the livelihood of those residing in the occupied territory. Over twenty percent of residents live in poverty and unemployment is devastatingly high. Israeli officials have used caloric calculations to limit the food supply and have systematically destroyed Palestinian farms, businesses, and homes. Subject to abusive military checkpoints, the indiscriminate revocation of civil and human rights, the imminent potential of random detention, imprisonment, and death, Palestinians live as perpetual colonial subjects.

To link these spaces is not to overestimate their similarities, but to understand the U.S. state as central to the perpetuation of global inequality and racialized terror. The historical oppression that has been challenged in Ferguson continues to expose the limitations of U.S. democracy. It is a demand for freedom and self-determination that most fundamentally unites residents in Gaza and communities of colour throughout the United States. To that end, projects like Facing Tear Gas have attempted to offer new global frameworks to combat repression and strengthen resistance movements. We must continue to have conversations about the troubling uses of military might and U.S. power, connecting experiences, as those in Gaza and Ferguson are doing, to the broader trends of racism, imperialism, and capitalism that have defined and circumscribed the voices of marginalized communities globally.

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Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.